DEFENDERS of the Starmer government on the left habitually point to its intention to renationalise the railways as an earnest of its radicalism amid so many counter-indicators.

It is not a claim that stands up to much scrutiny. The more details emerge, the less Labour’s plans look anything like the integrated publicly owned railway the country needs.

As is well known, the Tories did not just privatise the network, they shattered it into hundreds of fragments, separating track from train operation, maintenance from both and train ownership from everyone else.

Broadly, tracks and other railway land were handed to what became a property company, trains to banks, maintenance to the construction sector and train operations to, initially, private bus companies.

The basic infrastructure returned to public ownership under New Labour since repeated serious accidents had destroyed Railtrack’s capacity to operate profitably in the private sector.

Labour’s plan is to restore train franchises to public control as and when they come to their contractual end and unite them with Network Rail, Railtrack’s successor, in a new body to be styled Great British Railways (GBR).

That is moving in the right direction but even getting that far will be the work of years, and it is hard to see the public feeling much improvement in their services before the next general election.

Beyond that, the ruinous fragmentation will endure. The trains themselves will remain privately owned for a start.

In all the rip-offs involved in the privately owned railway, the rolling stock operating companies (Roscos) stand out. Controlled by financial interests, they have made fabulous profits leasing trains to operating franchisees.

Under the logic of privatisation, that could be understood when train operators were tied to franchises usually considerably shorter than the lifespan of rolling stock.

But where is the sense when almost the entirety of passenger train operations is supposed to be in public hands indefinitely, and therefore the Roscos will have only the one customer, and each train only one owner throughout its useful existence?

Unlike British Rail, which largely built its own trains, Great British Railways will also have to buy from private manufacturers, mainly abroad.

The freight railway will remain privately operated, setting up clashes likely to be resolved to the detriment of network access for goods traffic. Hitting climate change targets will be one casualty of this, as rail freight’s growth potential is hindered to road’s advantage.

And “open access” is going to remain. This allows private operators to bid to run specific routes in competition with the franchised operator, be it private or public. This will give existing failed operators a continuing foothold.

And GBR is to be forced to compete with rip-off online suppliers in selling tickets to customers, perpetuating pricing confusion.

This is, as the saying goes, no way to run a railway. The network is further a victim of Rachel Reeves and her “fiscal rules” — there has been no revival of the northern leg of HS2, nor of the “northern powerhouse” rail project.

Reeves has also cancelled the fund to explore the reopening of railway lines axed during the Beeching cuts of the 1960s.

This is vastly short of the integrated, well-funded, publicly run railway that people thought they were voting for. Even when Labour’s slow-motion programme has been completed many of the ailments which have led to public frustration through the privatisation years will remain.

The labour movement should not accept this second-best option. It should renew demands for the full return of the railway to public ownership, allied to a major investment in both restoring the network as well as reviving domestic train manufacturing capacity.